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January 14, 2010
New Sotoarc/Sotograph Release 4.0
Measure Architecture Conformance and Quality
Using predefined queries and metrics, Sotograph detects a wide range of potential problems and gathers information about many quality aspects. Besides architecture conformance there is also adherence to coding guidelines and rules, the existence of duplicated code blocks, and the identification of cyclically coupled elements. Sotograph also calculates metric values which measure size, coupling and complexity on different abstraction levels. This information can serve as input for Sotograph's other analysis tools, e.g. to visualize cyclically coupled groups.
The following analyses are relevant for architecture management:
- Differences between architecture and implementation
- Interface violations: External access of private parts of subsystems
- Detection of all classes, files, packages and subsystems which are strongly coupled by cyclical relationships
- Identification of large duplicated code blocks
- Detection of methods, classes, files, packages and subsystems which are suspicious because of their size, coupling or complexity
It is also possible to specify and monitor project-specific rules and metrics.
The screen dump below shows a graph with all subsystems and their dependencies layed out according to an architecture. Architecture violations are colored blue.
Illustration of packages that are strongly coupled by cyclical relationships. The packages are colored based on the comprising subsystem, i.e. all packages of the same subsystem have the same color. The variety of colors indicates that the cyclical relationships cross several subsystem boundaries.
Structural bottleneck: the central class “ContentController” is used by many classes and is itself dependenton many other classes. Sotograph makes it easy to detect objects with such characteristics.